Hmm. I'm getting a bit of what you're getting at with biology, and you might be right. But sociology doesn't become less true when it's harder to study it, and I'm throwing in my chips with the side that is guessing that most of the time genetics matter less than most people think on issues that can also be effected by societal conditioning.
The sex/gender thing was a correction, you were talking about gendered animals, and animals don't have genders, they just have sexes. Gender is the societal construction, sex is biological. It's just a definition/clarity issue-- sorry to sidetrack with it!
I wasn't saying I was basing my opinions based on that, but that the context that people are coming from-- being treated like shit by people on the internet who profess to be using evolutionary psychology but are really using pseudoscientific bullshit to defend the fact that they are misogynist and/or racist asswagons-- often is why people have such an emotional reaction to evolutionary psychology when brought up, particularly when it's brought up in discussions of sex, gender, race, and sexuality. It's not something against evolutionary psychology as a wh...
I could see that being the case, yeah.
I assume that those differences are slighter than one would assume, that society may necessarily point us in directions in which the evolutionary "purpose" of our traits are harmful (and so we should not privilege those evolutionary traits as inherently good or excuses for behavior which is societally harmful). I know that working from the viewpoint in which all of gendered behavior is culturally constructed will have me wrong sometimes, but the trend of history makes me think I'll be less wrong by keeping th...
In that case, feel free to substitute any issue in which there is a technical definition for a word that varies distinctly from culture to culture, can change dramatically over time, and discusses issues of subjectivity as applied to rationalist koans.
If that's the case, then they should be the approximately 450-495s and the approximately 520-570s, but there are lots of languages where green and blue are one color. See also history of blue; for anecdata see the link I posted in my original post in which the child who wasn't taught the sky is blue regularly calls it colorless or white.
I'm a feminist. I started reading this blog because I like Methods of Rationality and the overlap between rationalists and nootropics nerds intrigued me. I studied sociology, gender studies and cultural studies in college, so that's where my background is.
In discussions I've been a part of, evolutionary psychology ends up being sort of a pariah viewpoint because it's constantly used to reinforce social norms that are tied up in patriarchy. We also tend to, for various reasons, believe more in nurture over nature. Here's my reasons why I do that, and why I ...
I've been consistently bothered thinking about this story and I think the biggest issue I have with it is the idea that there is a right answer at all. I know this just puts me in the same category as the people at the college who teach everyone that Green and Blue are equally valid viewpoints, but it seems to me that the truth of the matter is that perception is so subjective and societally constructed. The other people in this thread have discussed this as a matter of the Greens rationalizing, hypothetically "seeing" the wrong color because the...
No. No, no, no, no. Blue light is light that has a wavelength of approximately 450-495 mm and green light is light that has a wavelength of approximately 520-570 mm. If I had a device that measured the wavelength of light, the wavelength of the light coming from the sky is an empirical fact. It may not be constant, and if the wavelength is in between those ranges then it may look more bluish-green or greenish-blue depending on various factors, but I cannot socially construct the wavelength of light emitted by a given source.
What do you think this is a metaphor for?
I had a bit about how it was possible that some animals had gender but decided that was probably nitpicky detail that overcomplicated the issue, which was that the original response to me was confusing sex and gender. Though it's also possible that some of the animals that you're discussing actually are just intersex, or that the entire issue is just us anthromorphizing animals, attributing personality traits to be gendered at all because we're so entrenched in biological determinism that we're willing to spew that social baggage on everything we touch.